This invention relates to electrical interconnection components and, more particularly, to a header for mounting a connector and interconnecting wires terminated in the terminal elements of the connector and electric circuits in another electrical component such as a circuit board.
Prior art headers were typically manufactured by extruding or molding the insulative base and thereafter drilling into the base spaced apertures for receiving the metallic header posts in an interference fit. A major component of the retention force resulting from post installations extends between adjacent posts causing a slight bow. As this bowing is in the longitudinal direction of the header, the bowing is cumulative and its extent is a function of the number of header posts. For a header of moderate or long length the bowing can become severe, making it difficult to solder the header to a circuit board and causing an installed header to have an undesirable appearance. One proposed header attempted to overcome the bowing problem by molding the header around prepositioned posts. This molding process involved considerable additional expense because of the complexities involved in the mold tooling.
Headers having additional functions are coming into increasing commercial prominence. For example, a locking header has a latch for holding a mounted connector while a polarizing header allows the connector to be mounted on the header in only one relative orientation. Such headers are typically available only in discrete lengths. Thus, a user installing a variety of different length connectors is required to maintain an extensive inventory of headers to fully cover the number of length, polarizing function, and locking function variations.